The Pain in Spain: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Over the past three or four decades, Spain had widely been seen as one of the great European success stories of the second half of the 20th century. In spite of their difficult, often violent political history, Spaniards surprised the world by undertaking a remarkably smooth transition to democracy in the wake of Franco’s death in 1975. In turn, this allowed them to rejoin the European mainstream, leaving behind decades of isolation and irrelevance. Membership of the European Union as of 1986 acted as an incentive to undertake difficult, often unpopular structural economic reforms in the 1980s and early 90s, an effort which finally appeared to bear fruit during the years 1995-2007, in which Spain recorded a long period of strong growth. However, the global financial and economic crisis of 2008 has exposed serious structural weaknesses in the performance of the Spanish economy, and today the country is often perceived as the new ‘sick man of Europe’.